With mounting concern that the Dominican Republic could fall victim to the booming international kidnapping industry, Police Chief Jaime Marte made a plea to families affected by such abductions to contact the police without delay. Already, vendors of kidnapping insurance policies are active in the Dominican Republic, which, in the past six months, has seen children and parents of leading Dominican businessmen fall prey to kidnappers (Capellan, Najri, Dume and now Lama).
Marte says there are sectors that seek to turn a profit on this breed of crime that, so far, has involved little risk and high payoffs. The Dominican Republic had been seemingly exempt from the trend taking place in several Latin American countries (primarily Colombia and Mexico), where 80 percent of the world?s occur today, according to publicly available statistics.
Marte says that victims? families who do not report the kidnappings are more prone to become double victims ? of the kidnappers themselves as well as of the security professionals they contract to assist them.
To the credit of the police, the only case of kidnapping in which the abductors were arrested took place when law enforcement officials were notified instead of seeking the assistance of the foreign specialists.